Obama’s Delicate Balance on Issue of Race and Policing

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President Obama, speaking at a news conference in Warsaw on Friday, deplored the shooting deaths of five police officers in Dallas.Published OnJuly 8, 2016CreditImage by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WARSAW — As Air Force One headed for Europe on Thursday afternoon, President Obama holed up in the plane’s office editing a Facebook post meant to express his anguish at two deadly shootings by police officers. Given what had happened, he told his aides, he didn’t think it was enough.

Wrestling with what the appropriate thing to do instead was the start of a wrenching 10 hours in which Mr. Obama would find himself whipsawed by grim events back home, forcing him to once again search for the right tone in a moment of national shock and mourning.

In that time, Mr. Obama delivered a trans-Atlantic call for racial justice after the gruesome deaths of two black men at the hands of the police, only to face the same television cameras hours later to denounce the killings of five officers by a black sniper.

For Mr. Obama, the killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in suburban St. Paul and the bloody reprisal in Dallas encapsulated the challenge he has faced throughout his presidency: how to confront a justice system that he views as tilted against the very people whom he, as the nation’s first black president, seemed singularly equipped to help.

As someone who knows well the persuasive power of speech, Mr. Obama has sought to use the authority of his office to amplify and support the emerging Black Lives Matter movement while striving not to become an unwitting megaphone for anti-police sentiment that has at times fueled violent protests and police shootings.

“This president’s role, and his unique quality, is to try to be reassuring and empathetic,” said Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League. “To try to be healing, but also to try to understand the pain both of the families of the victims in Baton Rouge and Minnesota and the pain in Dallas.”

Mr. Obama had left for a five-day trip to consult with European and NATO leaders hours after the bloody aftermath of the second police shooting in two days was streamed live on Facebook. Four hours into the flight to his first stop, Warsaw, the president stopped his press secretary, Josh Earnest, in a plane corridor.

He had decided to make a statement himself as soon as they landed, and had told his aides to collect statistics demonstrating racial bias in the criminal justice system. The carefully balanced statement he gave condemned those biases but acknowledged the dangers faced by the police.

While the president grabbed a few hours of sleep, the second half of his argument came terrifyingly true, when a sniper opened fire on police officers on the streets of Dallas. At his direction, his aides scrambled to prepare new remarks, discussing the logistics in emails that officials back at the White House started receiving at 2:30 a.m. Washington time.

This time, Mr. Obama abandoned the calibrated language of the previous night, condemning the Dallas shootings as a “vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.” As he spoke Friday morning, advisers began discussing whether to cut short his trip to Europe and how he might honor the victims in all three cities when he returned.

Early Saturday, after Mr. Obama had returned from dinner with other NATO leaders, the White House announced that he would shorten his trip by a day. He will fly to Spain on Saturday evening for a meeting with King Felipe VI and a speech to troops at an American naval station, but will skip a sightseeing visit to Seville. Early next week, Mr. Obama will travel to Dallas.

“In his gut, what he feels is this isn’t a matter of choosing between standing up for the rights of people and standing up for the police who do their jobs and are desperately needed,” said David Axelrod, a longtime friend and former White House adviser. “He understands that the real solution to these problems requires transcending that kind of thinking.”

Finding a way to transcend the country’s divisions has proved difficult. Grieving families in Minnesota and Louisiana made searing demands for justice that Mr. Obama cannot easily deliver, and some police advocates blamed him for what they said contributed to an environment that encouraged attacks on the police.

Speaking in Warsaw early Friday, Mr. Obama pleaded with Americans to imagine an officer shooting and killing a member of their family. “How would you feel?” he asked. Ten hours later, after learning of the dead officers in Dallas, Mr. Obama said, “Today is a wrenching reminder of the sacrifices that they make for us.”

If Mr. Obama’s words seemed familiar, it is because he has used them so many times in the past, after African-Americans have been the victims of violence by law enforcement authorities. The balance he has tried to strike between the grievances of the victims and the legitimate concerns of the authorities goes back to the earliest days of his presidency.

He has presided over a country too often gripped by grief and anger about the killing of young, black men at the hands of the police. After a grand jury in 2014 declined to indict officers in the killing of Eric Garner in New York City, Mr. Obama declared it “an American problem.”

“When anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law, that’s a problem,” he said. “And it’s my job as president to help solve it.”

But Mr. Obama has also labored to provide moral support to officers, many of whom say they feel under siege, their actions scrutinized by a distrustful public. Speaking to a police chief’s association in Chicago last year, he hailed the story of an immigrant officer in New York who was shot as he pursued a suspect.

“Officer Holder didn’t run toward danger because he thought of himself as a hero, he ran toward danger because he was a cop,” he said, adding: “I want to be as clear as I can be. I reject any narrative that seeks to divide police and communities that they serve.”

Mr. Obama had barely moved into the White House when he tripped over the issue of race and policing, calling out a white police officer for “acting stupidly” when he arrested a black Harvard professor. The ensuing furor did not recede until Mr. Obama hosted a White House “beer summit.”

But the passage of time failed to make it easier to find the right balance. Some African-American critics assailed his delay in speaking out after the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, at the hands of a resident, calling it an abdication of Mr. Obama’s responsibility as a president and a black man.

Other critics slammed the president for waiting almost a full day to issue a statement on the execution-style slaying of two New York City officers as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn.

William Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, on Fox on Thursday accused Mr. Obama’s administration of appeasing violent criminals in ways that “led directly to the climate that has made Dallas possible.”

White House officials vehemently reject such criticism, citing the president’s repeated condemnations of violence against the police as an answer to racial injustice. In his second set of remarks on Friday in Poland, Mr. Obama once again repeated it.

“Let’s be clear,” he said. “There is no possible justification for these kinds of attacks or any violence against law enforcement.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Grapples for Balance After Word of Dallas Killings. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe